Guest Access for Microsoft Teams Has Landed

Since its inception, there's been one feature at the top of most people's Microsoft Teams wish list: Guest access.

Today, I can report that the wait is finally over! You can now add anyone (err, anyone with an Azure Active Directory account...) as a guest to a Team. I'm expecting this will be extended in the not too distant future to also include basic Microsoft accounts (outlook.com etc) to also be added as a guest to a Team. This feature had been slated for release around June this year, so it's great to see it has finally made it to release. We've been structuring a new customer communications process for projects, managed services, etc - around Teams - and finally the missing piece was dropped into the puzzle today.

This is of course made even more interesting by the slip of the tongue last week regarding Skype for Business becoming Microsoft Teams. Whilst no official announcement from Microsoft one way or the other, I'll be front and centre at Microsoft Ignite this year where I expect to learn more. Keep an eye out for my Microsoft Ignite blog updates. A cynical person would suggest this might have been brought forward from Ignite to take some heat out of the Skype for Business transition leak.. but that would be a cynical person.

Couple of gotchas that we've noticed so far:

Your guest user must have an Office 365 subscription - the presuming factor here is if you're using Azure AD, there's a high likelihood that you have Office 365 services. There are pocket cases at the moment and it will be interesting to see how this is dealt with the introduction of being able to invite Microsoft Account (outlook.com/LiveID) accounts as these won't be tied to any form of Office 365 (typically)

When you become a guest of another 'Team' that is outside your organisation, it will show up in your Teams client as a separate account. Hence, you'll need to switch accounts between your 'Home' Team and the 'Guest' Team. Works like Yammer in that you have to swap networks to see messages. Looks like there will be consolidated notifications in the client so you can see which Teams need your attention.

Note: This feature is being rolled out progressively across Office 365 Tenants. If you don't yet have the ability to enable guest access, just wait longer.

Damien Margaritis is the Principal Consultant for the Modern Workplace practice at Insync Technology: an innovative Microsoft systems integrator. Damien is also involved with organising the
Melbourne Skype for Business User Group, held quarterly at Microsoft's Melbourne offices.